2008Q3 Reports: SIGANN

SIGANN, the ACL Special Interest Group for ANNotation, was approved as
a new SIG at last yearâ€™s ACL Executive meeting in Prague. The SIG is
an umbrella for research and activities associated with all aspects of
the creation and use of linguistic annotations for language data, and
is especially interested in fostering the identification of best
practice guidelines for linguistic annotation.

SIGANN was inaugurated at the first Linguistic Annotation Workshop
(LAW), was held in conjuction with ACL 2008 in Prague. At that
meeting, over 200 people signed up as members of the SIG. SIGANN now
officially organizes the LAW, the second of which was held at LREC
2008 in Marrakech.

(1) Corpus Working Group: This group has identified and made available
a small (40K) corpus representing several genres of written and spoken
text, drawn from the Open American National Corpus (OANC) and
therefore freely redistributable and reusable. The group is sponsoring
a â€œshared corpus taskâ€ by calling for researchers to annotate the
corpus for any phenomenon of interest, in any format, and to
contribute the annotations to SIGANN. All of the annotations will be
made freely available via the SIGANN site. The corpus was
strategically identified so that it is part of the data being
annotated by existing projects, including the ULA and ANC MASC,
thereby ensuring that a base of annotations for the data exist.

(2) Best Practices working group: This group was established to begin
work on the identification of best practices for linguistic
annotation. The groupâ€™s first (basic) report will be published this
summer, after input is gathered at the annual SIGANN meeting at the
LAW in May, 2008 in Marrakech.

SIGANN Officers:

President: Nancy Ide, Vassar College

Secretary: Adam Meyers, New York University

SIGANN Committee:

Inderjeet Mani (MITRE Corporation)

Antonio Pareja-Lora (SIC, UCM / OEG, UPM)

Sameer Pradhan (BBN Technologies)

Manfred Stede (Universitat Potsdam)

Nianwen Xue (University of Colorado)

The 2nd LAW was one of the most highly attended workshops at LREC. The
3rd LAW is currently planned to be held at ACL 2009 in Singapore,
possibly in conjunction with CONLL.